Mark J > Mark's Quotes

“A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“You cannot conceive, nor can I, of the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God.”
― Graham Greene, Brighton Rock

“So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“Never confuse faith, or belief—of any kind—with something even remotely intellectual.”
― John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

“The only way you get Americans to notice anything is to tax them or draft them or kill them.”
― John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

“If watching television doesn't hasten death, it surely manages to make death very inviting; for television so shamelessly sentimentalizes and romanticizes death that it makes the living feel they have missed something - just by staying alive.”
― John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

“I will tell you what is my overriding perception of the last twenty years: that we are a civilization careening toward a succession of anticlimaxes – toward an infinity of unsatisfying, and disagreeable endings. ”
― John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

“Watch out for people who call themselves religious; make sure you know what they mean––make sure they know what they mean!”
― John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

“It is not the brains that matter most, but that which guides them — the character, the heart, generous qualities, progressive ideas.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“To love someone means to see them as God intended them.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“The cleverest of all, in my opinion, is the man who calls himself a fool at least once a month.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“I can see the sun, but even if I cannot see the sun, I know that it exists. And to know that the sun is there - that is living.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“It's the great mystery of human life that old grief passes gradually into quiet tender joy.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Faith does not, in the realist, spring from the miracle but the miracle from the faith.”
― Dostoyevsky

“I believe the best definition of man is the ungrateful biped.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead

“Love is never a fulfillment. Life is never a thing of continuous bliss. There is no paradise. Fight and laugh and feel bitter and feel bliss: and fight again. Fight, fight. That is life.”
― D.H. Lawrence

“The human soul needs beauty more than bread.”
― D.H. Lawrence

“Dost thou not suspect my place? Dost thou not suspect my years? O that he were here to write me down an ass! But masters, remember that I am an ass. Though it be not written down, yet forget not that I am an ass. No, thou villain, thou art full of piety, as shall be proved upon thee by good witness. I am a wise fellow, and which is more, an officer, and which is more, a householder, and which is more, as pretty a piece of flesh as any is in Messina, and one that knows the law, go to . . . and one that hath two gowns, and everything handsome about him. Bring him away. O that I had been writ down an ass!”
― William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing

“There was a star danced, and under that was I born.”
― William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing

“Neighbours, you are tedious.

DOGBERRY
It pleases your worship to say so, but we are the poor duke's officers; but truly, for mine own part, if I were as tedious as a king, I could find it in
my heart to bestow it all of your worship.”
― William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing

“Done to death by slanderous tongue”
― William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing

“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.”
― William Shakespeare, As You Like It

“This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“Love sought is good, but giv'n unsought is better.”
― William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

“Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?”
― Lawrence Durrell, Justine

“There is no pain compared to that of loving a woman who makes her body accessible to one and yet who is incapable of delivering her true self -- because she does not know where to find it.”
― Lawrence Durrell

“We are all hunting for rational reasons for believing in the absurd.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Justine

“I had become, with the approach of night, once more aware of loneliness and time - those two companions without whom no journey can yield us anything.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Bitter Lemons of Cyprus

“These are the moments which are not calculable, and cannot be assessed in words; they live on in the solution of memory, like wonderful creatures, unique of their own kind, dredged up from the floors of some unexplored ocean.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Justine

“A city becomes a world when one loves one of its inhabitants.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Justine